Cross Cultural Conflicts in the Novels of Bharati Mukherjee
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==================================================================== Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 Vol. 19:3 March 2019 India’s Higher Education Authority UGC Approved List of Journals Serial Number 49042 ==================================================================== Cross Cultural Conflicts in the Novels of Bharati Mukherjee T. Vembu, Research Scholar, Periyar EVR College, Trichy [email protected] Dr. N. Geethanjali, Associate Professor, Periyar EVR College, Trichy [email protected] ===================================================================== Abstract Increased internationalization in the economic, political and social arenas has led to interpersonal cross cultural contact. Because much of this contact has not been successful, so many problems has raised in the two ways of life which lead to a feeling of alienation, pain of exile, depression and frustration. The present paper shows the multiplicity of problems that a migrant women confront today and how they fight against them to cope up with this. This study shows how a female identity is constructed through such multiple codes, components, language, myth, history, psychology gender and race. Keywords: Bharati Mukherjee, novels, Cross Cultural Conflicts Cross-cultural conflict is the clash between two cultures where culture is the prime identity of human life. Cross-cultural conflict is the testimony of painful experiences that imbibed by immigrants, who have faced several problems as psychological, social, global, economical and emotional on an alien land. Their painful experiences inspire many diaspora writers to share their varied experiences with world through their words. Cross-cultural conflict explains the problems like psychological, sociological, ideological, religious and so on. Cultural problems are the highest flying distinctiveness of Indian diaspora. Rootlessness is the most significant issue in the life of the immigrant. Cultural differences highlight man in the life of immigrants, and they hang between homeland and adopted land, and remain rootless in their entire life. The immigrant lives rootless and dies rootless. Rootlessness becomes the emblem of their life. The whole life struggle in adjusting alien life and culture with nostalgic feeling for motherland. Bharati Mukherjee deals with the themes related to Indianwomen particularly the problem of cross-cultural crisis and ultimate search for Identity. She also depicts the cultural clash between the east andthe west. She writes how the female protagonist tries to tackle the ==================================================================== Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 19:3 March 2019 T. Vembu, Research Scholar and Dr. N. Geethanjali Cross Cultural Conflicts in the Novels of Bharati Mukherjee 368 problem of loss of culture and endeavors to assume a new identity in the U.S.When a person leaves his own culture and enters into another culture, his original culture comes into conflict with the new one he finds in the alien land. This cultural transplant leads to a crisis of identity. This paper will shed light on the identity crisis and cultural conflict of the east and women in opposition to the dominant power of the west and men with references to Mukherjee’s novels within the framework of multicultural and feminist perspectives. Bharati Mukherjee, a world acclaimed novelist of post-modern era has taken up thetheme of identity crisis as one of the major themes in all her novels, depicting the psychological, cultural and spiritual stress faced by expatriates migrating to other countries in search of identity. She realized that her transformation was a two-way process because it affected both the individual aswell as the cultural identity. While other writers of migration write about a new place with aloss ofand erosion of original culture. The main aim of this paper is to show how the protagonists of all her novel story to adapt to American society and adjusted herself in the newfound society as an immigrant women where she struggles to survive in an alien land. Mukherjee asserted that in an age of diasporas one's native identitymay not be one's real identity as emigration brings changes, physical and psychological both which has been seen through all her characters in all her novel to sum up all the characters like Tara, Dimple and Jasmine face identity crisis. It is self-alienation of her characters that is brought to focus in the novel. The characters we find areforced to manage in accordance with the social demands. Mukherjee places her characters in such a situations from where they begin on self- analysis. They make self-discovery and very often find themselves alienated. Many times they travel through a world of fantasy in order to come to terms with the reality of situations. Bharati Mukherjee depicts the desires and expectations of immigrant women who want to live their native culture in abroad. Such women are isolated from their families, culture, home and parents and also the communities in which they. Their lives end with a sense of loss. They also feel that they are missing something. In this way the writer depicts the confusing state of mind of Indian woman and how they try to deal with situations. Bharti Mukherjee through her writing suggests two advantages of women liberation. One, it allows them to realize their potential as individuals in the wider society, and two, it is the only way by which they could achieve personal recognition and identity. Bharati Mukherjee is not only the most commercially successful among women writers of the Indian diaspora, but also the most controversial narrator of Indian cultural identity in a multicultural context, which has been seen in all her novels. Bharati Mukherjee’s first novel. The Tiger’s Daughter is a story of Bengali girl Tara Banerjee an immigrant women from India. Like Bharati Mukherjee , who visited India after her marriage with Clark Blaise in 1973,Tara also ==================================================================== Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 19:3 March 2019 T. Vembu, Research Scholar and Dr. N. Geethanjali Cross Cultural Conflicts in the Novels of Bharati Mukherjee 369 come back to her home land after staying seven years in America ; she comes to India only to witness poverty and political chaos in India . The ill treatment in a new modern life shock her and let her to get back in native land. Unable to feel a sense of belonging in India and in America she feels rootless. She lost her identity too. That’s why she is unable to feel herself an Indian or an American. In America she could not acculturate the cultural integration to herself. Uprooted from her native culture and identity, she feels a sense of alienation.Her novel Wife is the story of a middle-class Bengali girl Dimple, who is married to Amit an Engineer, after their wedding they go to America, where she understand that life is not as glamorous as she had imagined it to be, cultural shock, Alienation, in capacity to form friendship with her neighbors, continual viewing of violent soap operas and her husband’s long stays at office further complicate the mind of Dimple. It makes her psychic to the extent of imaginatively killing her husband in a grotesque manner. Basically Dimple fails to conceive marriage as a life-long bond which needs love as an adhesive to both strong them and ensure a life-long commitment to each other. In her another novel Jasmine, which is a feminist novel the protagonist rebels against the age old superstitions and traditions. Despite the odds against her, she gets assimilated successfully into the American culture/society. She changes herself in order to change the world around. As products of the diaspora, Mukherjee’s novels deal with nostalgia for a lost home, disillusionment of expatriation, fragmentation of the self, exuberance of immigration, assimilation, culture translation and negotiation. Jasmine is Mukherjee’s model of an assimilated immigrant.So two of her novels wife and Jasmine portrait the Journeys of two young women to the U.S.A. for different reasons, under dissimilar circumstances, both of them pass through physical, mental and emotional agony affecting theirwhole being to such an extent that they are driven to violence.Mukherjee herself has experienced the exuberance of immigrant existence. An immigrant’s ideal is to get assimilated into the mainstream culture. Women characters of Bharati Mukherjee like Tara, Dimple and Jasmine belonging to different cultures are assimilated in the new culture and made efforts to make a new identity for themselves. This scenario is enacted in the new culture where adaptation and assimilation is not so very easy, wearies them down into violence and aggressiveness. This upbringing gives a very strong base to build a future for herself in a foreign land. Mukherjee's early novels The Tiger's Daughterand Wife explore the conditions of being an Indianexpatriate in North America. The protagonists of the novels Tara and Dimple respectively are expatriates, geographically as well as in mind and spirit. Just as other expatriates, they too are not comfortable in both the native and ==================================================================== Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 19:3 March 2019 T. Vembu, Research Scholar and Dr. N. Geethanjali Cross Cultural Conflicts in the Novels of Bharati Mukherjee 370 alien cultures. Here, expatriation is not only a major theme but also a metaphor for deeper levels of solitude and alienation. The Holder of The World and Leave It to Me are in some sense interconnected. The former is a documentation of a story of Hannah Easton an imaginary as well as realistic character. The complex pattern of two themes running parallel: The life of the Hannah Easton belonging to the seventeenth century and the life of Beigh Masters of the present century. The novelist wears the mask of scientific biographer and making brilliant use of devices common to the historical novels. She presents the Moghul life and times forever three hundred years on one time scale while on the other she projects the life of Beigh Masters, a young girl in her early twenties.